I don’t want to see the new version of 'Brighton Rock’, any more than I would
like to hear Vaughan Williams played by an orchestra of drunk
penny-whistlers, says Simon Heffer.

I was proceeding serenely up an escalator on the London Underground the other day when, were it not that I was being conveyed automatically, I would have been stopped in my tracks. Among the advertisements on the wall that I drifted past was one announcing a new film of Brighton Rock. One word, and one only, came into my mind: why?

It is a dangerous game to start naming the greatest British films ever made, but John Boulting’s 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel is on the shortlist, and high up it. I cannot begin to say how many times I have seen it. There is nothing about it that is not perfect. Although a world war had intervened between Greene’s novel (published in 1938) and the film, the seediness of the Brighton in which Greene envisaged it is perfectly represented. It is completely authentic. The casting was sublime: Richard Attenborough (and God knows what he must think about the new version) as the twisted, screwed-up thug Pinkie, Hermione Baddeley excelling as his nemesis Ida, and Carol Marsh as an entirely credible Rose, Pinkie’s unfortunate girlfriend. Their performances were entirely convincing. The direction was immaculate, the photography understated, the whole exercise a masterpiece. So I ask again: why?

I have not seen the new film. It is not out until February 4, and no one has been kind enough to ask me to a preview. I have seen the trailer, which is conveniently available online. You may think badly of me for saying that I should not, in any case, be minded to go, any more than I would want to go to a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony (a work contemporary with Boulting’s film) that I knew would be played on the penny whistle by an orchestra of drunk penny-whistlers. Having read some of the reviews of the film on the internet (the main newspaper critics have yet to have the pleasure) I shall certainly have something better to do.

The film is what Hollywood types call the “directorial debut” of Rowan Joffe, son of the director Roland Joffé (the father has an accent; the son doesn’t). It has two great British thespians in it, Dame Helen Mirren and John Hurt. They may be having second thoughts. Here are some insights from the reviews: “Vacuous portentousness” (Front Row Films); “Dismal misfire… Joffe gets just about everything wrong” (Philip Concannon); “Helen Mirren… and John Hurt… phone in their performances” (Christine Estima); “You may wonder why Rowan Joffe chose this to be his first feature… having sat through it I am none the wiser” (Neil Sadler).

But the man who really didn’t like it was Matthew Thrift on the Cinephile website, who was cross that it was chosen as the “surprise” entry to be screened at the London Film Festival. “Its superficial British roots [were]… the only validation for screening a work of such staggering ineptitude,” he wrote. It was “the nadir of the 85 works I’ve seen at the LFF so far”. He denounced it as “this tonal and conceptual disaster” and “a particularly amateurish school play” with “characters defined by facile dialogue”. Like almost all the other critics, he attacked the score and the casting for good measure.

Related Articles

This is not a good start for Mr Joffe, or for his film. One critic, seeking to be charitable, suggests that the director was not in fact remaking John Boulting’s masterpiece – how could he be? – but was reinterpreting Greene’s novel. The key difference between the two films, other than that one appears to be no good at all, is that while Boulting’s had a contemporaneous setting, Mr Joffe’s is, inexplicably, moved to 1964. Brighton in 1964 was not famous for its razor gangs, of one of which Pinkie was a commanding officer: it was famous as the front line of the battle between mods and rockers. So these creatures are transposed upon Greene’s original conceit.

If it were such a brilliant idea, one wonders why the author, who was still going strong at that point, didn’t revise his novel to take these important developments into account. I know that Shakespeare is done in settings that are not early-17th-century, and God knows I have seen some accounts of the works of Wagner that are a million miles from men and women with horns on their helmets and wearing animal skins. But both Shakespeare and Wagner make eternal points through their art in a way that Greene does not.

One may argue that Greene’s main point in the novel – about the Catholic Church – is one such eternal idea. However, the struggles that Pinkie in particular has with his God are aggravated by the specific context of 1930s Brighton, the advance of the modern world, the battle with secularism and the decline of moral values. This not only works well in the context of the immediate pre-war period; it does not work remotely in the same way in 1964. The shifting of the period is utterly pointless and seems (to judge from the trailer) merely an excuse to mobilise a fleet of motor-scooters for a cinematic stunt. Or perhaps, now that they have stopped teaching history in schools, nobody could quite imagine what the 1930s looked like and sounded like, or how people behaved.

Greene’s novels are enjoyable, and one or two of them are downright great. Brighton Rock verges on that category. The film, though, is in its way more satisfying than the book. Greene, an experienced film critic as well as novelist, wrote the screenplay. The 10 years or so between book and film had broadened his abilities and deepened his thinking. The partnership between him and Boulting was ideal. There has manifestly been no such marriage of talent in the new version. Well ought to have been left alone.

I can see that a novel is there to be filmed as often as people wish to film it, though they must take their chances against other versions already in the marketplace, and the loyalty that the public feel towards those established works. Yet at a time when it seems to be producing more turkeys than a poultry farm in December, the so-called British film industry needs to think carefully about itself. Hollywood inflicts remakes on the world that sometimes succeed because they never underestimate the lack of taste of the American public. Anyone here who is educated enough to know about Brighton Rock and to want to see a film of it is not going to want to see a farrago. Look across the Channel at the wonderful originality of the French cinema today, which I have no doubt is the best in the world. Why can’t we do that?